Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.
And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.
That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.
I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.
With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.
The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.
It's hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres - and I've done it a couple times - it just makes the whole struggle more.
I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma's best movies.
Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.
I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.
I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.
I haven't seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven't seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it - see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.
Almost every other Western in the last ten years has failed, since Dances with Wolves.
But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.
I didn't really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.
The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.
It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.
